Faculty, We Have Met the Enemy, and it is Us
Two weeks ago, the historian Garrett Felber reached a confidential settlement with the University of Mississippi, where in December 2020 his appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor was not renewed under abrupt and alarming circumstances. “I was terminated because of my public statements, including legitimate criticisms of the university. Rather than go to court and seek reinstatement, I have chosen to move on and continue my work from a position outside this university,” Felber declared.
The case attracted considerable attention, including an open letter to the administration protesting the termination, which attracted over 5,400 signatures, as well as statements from the American Historical Association, PEN America, FIRE, United Campus Workers of Mississippi, and the Organization of American Historians. As the chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, I issued a statement in response to the university’s claim that its actions were “consistent with AAUP standards,” noting that while it would be improper for me to offer any sort of judgment at this stage, I did have serious “concerns about both the process that reportedly has been followed and the stated grounds for termination.”
As my third and final term as Committee A chair has now expired and the case has settled, I can be less circumspect. As John Wilson put it, Felber’s termination was “one of the most remarkable attacks on academic freedom in recent memory.” His nonrenewal did not follow any normal review procedure but was implemented unilaterally by his department chair, either at the behest of or with the support of the provost. The stated grounds for termination — failing to communicate sufficiently with his department chair while on research leave — were not only, as I noted back in December, “grossly inadequate” but seemed obviously pretextual. I won’t rehash the case here, but suffice it to say that Felber’s boldly antiracist politics and work on prisoner rights offended powerful donors, alumni, and campus administrators. The latter, it has now been revealed, appear to have been “monitoring” Felber’s activities at least since December 2019, when he offered public criticism of a major donor to the school’s journalism program (himself a “free speech” advocate) with financial ties to the private-prison industry.
My concern here is with what happened between last December and now. Felber’s attorneys seem to believe that he would have had a strong First Amendment case. Perhaps, but I’m skeptical. For one thing, as I explain in the chapter on law in my forthcoming Understanding Academic Freedom, the academic freedom of individual faculty members unfortunately can claim only somewhat limited constitutional standing, Justice William Brennan’s famous declaration that it is a “special concern of the First Amendment” notwithstanding. For another, the courts have regularly — and often appropriately — exercised quite a bit of deference to the independence and autonomy of a college or university’s own internal processes of self-governance and review.
How did those processes function at the University of Mississippi? That is a critical question. The answer, I’m afraid, is disheartening.
As I wrote in December, “thanks to previous cases that led to AAUP censure at UM, the university, in order to remove that censure, adopted policies,” consistent with AAUP recommendations, “that provide for appeals … to a faculty-review body that can adjudicate whether a professor’s academic freedom has been violated.” At the time, I rather naïvely assumed that, if Felber made use of those policies, such a faculty-review body could not help but conclude that his termination was in violation of his academic freedom. Perhaps the administration would ignore or overrule such a verdict — in which case an AAUP investigation and likely censure would be all but inevitable — but it was hard to imagine that a properly constituted faculty review would conclude otherwise. I was wrong.